Price: $150

Verdict: The form factor is utterly bizarre—a flip phone as wide as Oprah’s ass with a full QWERTY keyboard that takes its design cues from a chick’s makeup compact thing (whatever the hell they’re called). It doesn’t bother to make it up by being RAZR-thin, either. Inside is another dumbphone that desperately wants to be smart, but it copies off the bright kids' paper enough to do a reasonable impression.

The UI is remarkably navigable, with real transition animations and a nice, contrast-y design, though it would benefit with a bit more horsepower to keep it 100 percent zippy and silky smooth. When you open it up, you’ve got a customizable row of icons you thumb left or right through, and after pausing for a second (this is where the bonus horsies would be nice) a pop-up fills the rest of the screen with what it does—for instance, the Google icon gives you Maps, Gmail and YouTube. It has an app manager too, also like a real smartphone. If only Sprint's thoroughly integrated stores were as well designed.

Email is really robust, and better than either Verizon or AT&T’s standard email offering—the built-in client gives you access to all the majors (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail) and IMAP and POP accounts, plus it makes it easy to switch between them. It’s the client that’s been shipping on Sprint’s feature phones for a bit, but since the Lotus has a QWERTY keyboard, it’s actually usable now.

The browser is where it really reveals that it belongs in a remedial class—while it’s another incremental improvement on generally crappy dumbphone browser, it crashed the whole phone more than once on big pages, though it’s totally fine if you stick to mobile optimized sites, especially with EV-DO. The other big flaw in this phone is the media player—it’s too tightly wrapped up with Sprint’s music store and takes too many clicks to get to, though the YouTube app ain’t half bad. Bonus points for the power adapter, which lets you plug it in with any micro USB cable, though they’re sorta negated by the 2.5mm headphone jack.

In short, if you can live with the form factor, the Lotus is a fairly capable little (big) phone for someone who’s not quite ready to graduate to a big boy smartphone, though $150 for a wannabe is a bit steep when you can get one for that much (or less). $99 would make this a higher recommend. Baby steps, baby steps. [Sprint]

The keyboard especially is a joy to use. The keys are bubbly, well defined, and give a distinctive click when you hit the key. The screen is bright, sharp, and appears to have a respectable pixel density. The phone UI was too early in development to get a strong idea of what to expect, but Frog collaborated with Sprint in the design, which was easy on the eyes.

The LG Lotus is set to hit stores in October for $150 and will probably attract those who want the texting features without the high end features that drive prices up. [LG Lotus on Giz]